'I've lost everything': Their son was killed on a Toronto street five years ago — and the parents will never forget

Oliver Martin and Dylan Ellis were killed in Toronto five years ago

Five years after two gunshots blasted their world apart, Susan Martin and Alan Dudeck are moving out, but not moving on.

They’ll leave behind their red brick house on a leafy street in Rosedale this month — their home of 25 years where their four children were raised, a haven for their son’s friends even if he wasn’t there. There’s too much space, too many memories. And their son is never coming home.

“It won’t help,” Ms. Martin said of the move, while sitting around her backyard patio table. Moving house is forcing her to pack, to go through Oliver’s things. The other day she found a little box that held his baby teeth. “I couldn’t,” said Ms. Martin. “I just had to put it back and close the drawer.”

At 12:08 a.m. on Friday, June 13, 2008, Oliver Martin and his best friend, Dylan Ellis, were shot dead, side-by-side, strapped into the front seat of a Range Rover parked on Richmond Street. Their deaths have become one of Toronto’s most shocking and high-profile murders, largely because they remain a mystery. Police investigators — at least one who has worked more than 150 homicide cases — are baffled to this day.

The two 25-year-old boys — lifelong friends — had left a gathering to watch the NBA finals game that night and swung back around to return forgotten keys. A man approached. Words — not aggressive words, police say — were exchanged. The gunman shot Dylan, a promising photographer, first. Then he shot Oliver, who had just passed his accountant’s exam, in the passenger seat. Oliver’s girlfriend, who was hiding in the back, survived.

The signs advertising a reward of $5,000 for any information have long been bleached by the sun and removed from storefront windows in the Queen West area. People have forgotten. But for their families, it doesn’t get easier — the pain just changes.

“It’s like living in a horror movie — for me, anyway,” said Ms. Martin in an interview on the eve of the anniversary of the murders. “I have this childlike belief that it’s all just a horror movie and it will end and Oliver will have his life. That’s how I keep living.”

Tonight they will gather with friends for an annual 8 p.m. candlelight vigil at Ramsden Park, where a tree was planted and a bench dedicated in the boys’ memory. Much of the friend group, of which Oliver and Dylan were “the glue,” has stuck together, said Andrew Gilchrist, 30, whose keys the boys were returning that night.

“Every day still there’s something that will remind me of them,” he said. “Has it gotten easier over time? I think that’s natural.”

For Oliver’s father, there are still “triggers,” that elicit painful waves of sadness.

“We don’t listen to music as much anymore,” said Mr. Dudeck. “It’s too powerful.”

Every summer for more than 25 years, they’ve driven to P.E.I. to spend time at the Martin family cottage. It’s where friends still gather every June 29 to mark Oliver’s birthday. This year, nine will attend.

“I haven’t replaced the music [in the car] for years and years, the kids grew up with that. There are some songs I know, I’ll just be bawling my eyes out.”

Of course they want justice for his death. But they don’t think about the killer, if he’s still walking the streets.

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“I don’t even think of whoever did this as a person,” Ms. Martin said. “I think of it as evil.”

The pain of a trial would be unbearable, Mr. Dudeck said, though people often ask him about a pursuit of justice.

“It’s not some detective novel” to Mr. Dudeck and Ms. Martin, it’s more complicated than that.

On the fourth anniversary last year, Mr. Dudeck and Ms. Martin delivered a letter to Queen’s Park, demanding the McGuinty government move to ban handguns. They were politely told that is federal jurisdiction, not provincial. They’ve all but dropped the effort, believing they’ll get nowhere with the Harper government.

For now one source of comfort is a candle flickering every day in their house — a reminder that Oliver is with them. Ms. Martin hates to see it extinguished, Mr. Dudeck said.

Shortly after his death, they put a candle in every front window of the house, a house that’s hard, but necessary, to leave.

“It’s like I’ve lost everything now — the home we were always so happy in, it’s gone too,” said Ms. Martin.